Climate-driven changes in the water cycle will affect large regions of the world. Credit: Friedrich Böhringer/creative commons license

By Stephen Leahy

CANCÚN, Dec 8, 2010 (IPS/TerraViva) – As the world heats up, continents are drying up, with severe droughts forecast in the future. But negotiators at the climate summit here seem to have forgotten about water in their endless discussions over forests, carbon trading and finances.

“The main impact of climate change is on the planet’s water cycle,” said Henk van Schaik of the Cooperative Programme on Water and Climate, a foundation based in the Netherlands.

“Climate-driven changes in the water cycle will affect large regions of the world,” van Schaik told TerraViva at a side event meeting here at COP 16 in Cancún .

The impact of climate on the world’s water resources is not addressed within the U.N. climate framework, said Anders Berntell of the Stockholm International Water Institute.

“Negotiators here see it as just another sector of the economy but it is a basic element for life. Water is the bloodstream of our planet,” Berntell said.

The global water cycle has already been affected with more intense rainfalls and decline in the evapotranspiration rate over land, according to new scientific research. Evapotranspiration is the term that describes the process of water evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth’s land surface to its atmosphere.

As the temperature goes up, rates of evaporation are expected to increase. They did until 1998, when there was a leveling off and then a decline in recent years, even though the planet continued to warm, said Beverly Law, a global climate change researcher at Oregon State University.

“Evapotranspiration depends strongly on the amount of water available… the decline seems to be because less water is available,” Law, who led the first global study, told TerraViva.

There is less water because the soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, Law and her colleagues reported in a study in the journal Nature last October.

Not only are soils drying up, since less of the sun’s energy is being used in the evapotranspiration process, more is available to warm the air in these regions, says Law.

Within the next 30 years, large parts of parts of Asia, the United States, and southern Europe, and much of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East could experience serious droughts based on another study also published last October.

“We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognised by both the public and the climate change research community,” said Aiguo Dai a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the U.S. state of Colorado.

“If the projections in this study come even close to being realised, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” he said in a release. Dai’s projections are based on computer climate modelling of the future as the climate continues to heat up.

Although based on models, those projections are fairly “robust”, says Kevin Trenberth, a senior climate scientist who is also at NCAR. Climate experts have long maintained that one of the major effects of climate change is “that places already wet get wetter and places already dry get drier”, Trenberth said in an email.

Water is not only an essential element for life, it is essential for nearly every sector of the global economy, including energy, manufacturing, transport, agriculture and more, noted Laura Tuck, director of the Sustainable Development Department at the World Bank.

“By 2030 in order to feed the world, water use for agriculture will need to increase 45 percent,” Tuck told attendees at the side event meeting.

Energy demands will be 160 percent higher and some of that will have to come from hydroelectric power. Many proposed climate mitigation plans, like reducing forest degradation and deforestation (REDD), or sequestering carbon in soil cannot be accomplished without water, she noted.

“In addition, institutions need to change because they were built in a world when there was no climate change,” Tuck said.

There has been some progress, with consideration being given to including water on the agenda of the next Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) meeting in June of 2011, reported Berntell of the Stockholm International Water Institute.

Irrigation near Kakamas, South Africa: sustainable use of water is especially critical in a warming world. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Stephen Leahy

MEXICO CITY, Dec 7, 2010 (IPS/TerraViva) Africa will be amongst the hardest hit regions of the world as the climate heats up, threatening the continent’s food security, experts agree. If global temperatures rise 2.0 degrees C, southern Africa will warm an additional 1.5 degrees to a 3.5-degree increase on average.

Such temperatures could be reached as early as 2035. The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain recently advised that a 4.0-degree C rise in the global average temperature could be reached as soon as 2060 if the ever-increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not curbed.

“The prognosis for agriculture and food security in SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa) in a 4°C+ world is bleak,” write the authors of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to be published next month.

“A four-degree C world would be horrendous and must be avoided at all costs,” said Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya and co-author of a paper in the Royal Society special issue “Four degrees and beyond”.

“This special issue is a call to action so we can avoid such a future,” Thornton told TerraViva.

Even if a new climate treaty came out of the final week of the 16th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancún, 2.0 degrees C looks inevitable, he said. No one is realistically expecting a comprehensive climate treaty for several years. This means southern Africa can expect to be 3.5 degrees C hotter and much drier in future, he said.

“It is going to get very difficult for rain-fed agriculture in this region,” Thornton warned.

Even 2.0 degrees C would be devastating for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and other neighbouring countries, said Lance Greyling a member of South Africa’s parliament.

“We can’t have more than 1.5 degrees C globally and that has been Africa’s position since Copenhagen COP,” Greyling said in an interview in Mexico City at the Globe International forum on climate change.

Water is a huge constraint on South Africa’s agriculture and economy since 98 percent of freshwater resources are already allocated, he said.

A great deal of work will be needed to help farmers adapt to these new conditions, including the development of heat and drought-tolerant varieties, said Thornton. Learning from other regions with conditions similar to those expected in southern Africa in the next 20 to 30 years, as well as bringing seeds from those regions, has to be part of the adaptation strategy.

It also means that water-hungry crops like maize will need to be replaced by cassava, millet and sorghum. That involves social change since local people largely prefer maize and food preparation of those other crops is different and may be more difficult, he said. “It’s a towering challenge,” Thornton noted.

Climate projections for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa are less clear in a 2.0 degrees-plus world. Changes in seasons and rainfall patterns have already been occurring for the last 20 or 30 years. That’s expected to continue. Higher temperatures mean crops need more water, and projections for precipitation, especially in dry regions, are that rainfall will be similar or less abundant.

More importantly, rain will likely occur in fewer events with longer dry periods between, making agriculture very difficult as the planet heats up.

The paper concludes that the cost of reaching the Millennium Development Goal on food security – halving the proportion of hungry people by 2015 – in a +2°C world will be around $40–$60 billion per year. “Without this investment, serious damage from climate change will not be avoided,” it said.

By 2050, countries in the Sahel, the region south the Sahara desert, will experience crop-growing conditions for which there are no current analogues globally, said Sonja Vermeulen, deputy director for research at the Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security launched last week in Cancún.

This is a 10-year, $200 million research initiative cope with climate change impacts on agriculture. It hopes to reduce poverty by 10 percent in targeted regions and lower the number of rural people who are malnourished by 25 percent by 2020.

Those unprecedented climate conditions make it difficult if not impossible to grow food. There may be no possibility of adaptation without significant outside resources, Vermeulen said in a statement.

The mounting hazards of climate change are beyond the “current coping range” of either local communities or national institutions, agreed Janice Jiggins of the Wageningen University and Research Centre in The Netherlands. Africa’s losses could in theory be offset by gains in productivity in more northern regions like Canada and Russia – however, counting on that is a very risky strategy, she said.

Previous studies have shown that under 2.0 degrees of warming, global grain prices will likely double by 2050, if not before. An additional 25 million more children could be malnourished, said Gerald Nelson, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Those studies only looked at changes in temperatures and precipitation and “the month to month variations were dramatic”, Nelson told TerraViva. The impacts on livestock have yet to be incorporated. If temperatures continue to rise by 3.0 and 4.0 degrees, it will be very hard to do anything to adapt in many parts of the world, he said.

Even with a +2 degrees C hotter world, the real scale of the problem of food security in Africa has been heavily underestimated and will require massive investments, Thornton concluded.

“It is completely unfair that Africa is not really responsible for the problem, and yet the greatest burden falls on their agriculture sector,” he said. “The last thing Africa needed was climate change.”

CANCÚN, Dec 7, 2010, (IPS/TerraViva) – One more thing to add to the checklist of requirement for a sound global agreement on climate change: water.

“In Africa we have seen that climate change is manifested in water,” said Bai-Mass Taal, executive secretary of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW), addressing a side event at the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancún. “We either have too much water in floods, or the scarcity of the natural resource in droughts.”

However, said Taal, water is not explicitly mentioned in the text of a treaty to respond to global climate change being debated by representatives of nearly 200 countries.

“The United Nations has declared water as a human right – what does that mean in the African context where the resource is getting more scarce every day with climate change worsening the situation?” said Taal.

Africa is not alone in facing growing challenges around water. At the same event, Dr Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, vice-president of the Asian Development Bank, highlighted growing demand for decreasing water resources in Asia, where a shortfall of sustainable supply of as much as 40 percent is predicted by 2030.

“Shortages of accessible freshwater are being experienced for domestic water supply and sanitation which spill over to other sectors, constraining energy generation, reducing agricultural production and food supply while threatening public health and regional security,” said Schaefer-Preuss.

Asia is already experiencing more frequent, more intense floods and droughts. Rising sea levels threaten 450 million people who lie in low-lying coastal zones.

“Sea level rise can directly damage coastal infrastructure,” she said. “It can also reduce water security through salt water contamination of coastal aquifers, affecting both agriculture and urban water supply.”

In Asia and Africa, water scarcity places an additional burden on women who travel every-longer distances to find water for households; the additional time and labour can lead to girls missing out on education.

Making the case for water

The Water and Climate Coalition (WCC) is a body pressing for water resources management to be included at the heart of the global response to climate change, which counts NGOs, U.N. agencies, community-based organisations, business and trade unions as members.

“We need an establishment of a work programme on water and climate under the UNFCCC,” said Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, one of the WCC’s member organisations.

Some progress is being made, as six countries have called for water to be tabled as an agenda item in the technical discussions under the UNFCCC.

But there is also powerful dissent. Developed countries feel water should not form part of the negotiations but must be incorporated into adaptation measures.

“The negotiations are complicated as they are,” said Aart van der Horst, the senior policy officer of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He said creating a new focus on water would only further complicate negotiations that require the approval of all parties to the convention. “Let’s stop creating so many windows; but let’s work with what we have to allow countries to come up with adaptation strategies specific to their needs.”

Van der Horst said addressing water security can readliy be funded through adaptation finance already being discussed, such as the 380 million dollar fund for Least Developed Countries. More money will be available from the much larger funding already pledged under the Copenhagen Accord, or from an adaptation fund yet to be agreed as part of the UNFCCC process itself.

“Let’s keep it simple and work with what we have towards adaptation,” he said.

Taal acknowledged there is a deadlock between developing countries and richer nations over water. “Unfortunately, we say water is a resource and it needs a special focus.”

The call is to recognise water in climate change negotiations as both a transmitter of the impacts of global warming, and a key vehicle for strengthening social, environmental and economic resilience to them.

“We believe that water and its management can offer a unifying focus for global, regional as well as national co-operation on adaptation to climate change,” said Dr Anna Grobicki, executive secretary of another WCC member, the Global Water Partnership, at a meeting last year.” Investments in integrated water resources development and management are investments in adaptation.”

Maize is a food staple in Guatemala's "Dry Corridor," which has been hit by both drought and flood. Credit:Danilo Valladares/IPS.

By Danilo Valladares*

GUATEMALA CITY, Nov 23, 2010 (Tierramérica/TerraViva) – “Many people still believe that water is a gift from God.” This statement from a Guatemalan scientist alludes to Central America’s neglect of its water resources – and the subsequent impact on agriculture.

Because it is a divine gift, “they feel they don’t have to pay for it,” said Edwin Castellanos, who holds a doctorate in environmental sciences and has contributed research to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But Castellanos told Tierramérica he believes “we should pay not only for adequate water service, but also for cleaning up the water we pollute, which ultimately reaches the rivers and lakes, perpetuating a cycle of contamination and death from diarrheic diseases.”

However, adequate water management requires regulation and education. Guatemala and El Salvador, for example, lack legislation in this area.

“We don’t have laws to regulate the appropriate use of water due to lack of political will and pressure from external groups that benefit from this legal void, especially factories and agro-industries,” said Castellanos, co-director of the environmental studies centre at the private Valley of Guatemala University.

Proper management also means “storing water in small reservoirs at the household or community level, and using dams, as well as the development of infrastructure for transporting water to where it is most scarce,” he said.

Central America, one of the world’s most environmentally vulnerable regions, is already feeling the effects of climate change in water resources and farming.

In some countries of the region, laws have been passed “and agreements have been ratified, but there is an enormous gap between that and taking definitive action,” said Costa Rican IPCC advisor Edgar Gutiérrez Espeleta.

Global warming, water management and agriculture “are not priorities” in a region absorbed in “boosting exports and tourism at any cost,” said Gutiérrez Espeleta, expert in forestry sciences and statistics.

“Water has been managed as if it were an inexhaustible good,” he said, in agreement with Guatemala’s Castellanos.

On the isthmus, each person in theory should have more than 3,000 cubic metres of water available per year, while in North Africa or the Middle East, the rate is 200 to 300 cubic metres per person per year, according to the Alianza por el Agua (Alliance for Water), a network of public and private institutions in Spain and Central America.

But just 42 percent of Central America’s rural population and 87 percent of the urban population have access to potable water. And supply and distribution have only worsened with climate change.

“We know that global warming will bring more drought for the Pacific side and more rain for the Caribbean side… Now is the time to begin managing the available water with a focus on the watershed and the participation of everyone,” said Gutiérrez Espeleta.

Hurricanes Mitch (1998), Stan (2005) and Agatha (2010), and the 2009 drought — all attributed in part to climate change — left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and vast damage to agriculture across the region, mainly in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Losses in the farming sector due to environmental disasters between 1972 and 2007 total nearly 11 billion dollars, equivalent to 5.7 percent of Central America’s GDP (gross domestic product) in 2007, according to a report on climate change’s effects on agriculture by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Farming and livestock are the engines of the regional economy, and if agro- industry is included, they represent 18 percent of the total GDP, as well as being the main suppliers of food, says the study.

In the opinion of El Salvadoran consultant Yvette Aguilar, the strategies to protect water should be encompassed in land-use regulations, which also implies improving agriculture.

Farming and ranching use 70 percent of all water extracted for human consumption worldwide, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“It’s vital to implement measures that facilitate adaptation by poor rural and urban families,” that include sustainable agriculture and defence of “the right to land,” said Aguilar.

The drought triggered last year by El Niño/Southern Oscillation, a cyclical climate phenomenon that alters the currents and temperatures in the inter- tropical zone of the Pacific Ocean, led to the deaths of 54 children and several hundred adults from malnutrition in Guatemala’s “Dry Corridor,” where residents rely on subsistence farming for survival.

The subsistence farmers, who grow maize, beans and vegetables, “should adapt to climate change and augment their income by combining the cultivation of grains or vegetables with trees and ecological farming,” he said.

Surplus crops, destined primarily for the market, need a similar treatment. “And the big farms should use precision agriculture, based on technology, for the rational use of water and agro-chemicals,” Monterroso said.

Leonel Jacinto, of FAO Guatemala, told Tierramérica that in the Dry Corridor experts are looking for ways to improve moisture retention in the soil, using crop stubble, agro-forestry and organic fertilisers — and encouraging farmers to diversify what they grow.

“The first step is to create experience with a few families to demonstrate that it works,” he said. In this scheme, the role of the government comes later.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.) (END)

MEXICO CITY, Nov 17, 2010 (Tierramérica/TerraViva) – Without financing, many Mexican farmers cannot improve their ageing irrigation systems, which are essential if Mexico is to withstand the effects of climate change and reduce its emissions of greenhouse-effect gases.
Pressurised and drip irrigation are two leading-edge options that also make relatively efficient use of water and electricity, reducing power fossil fuel burning and greenhouse gases emissions.

These new systems are expensive, but “they would allow us to grow crops year-round and have more jobs and better incomes,” farmer Oseas Espino told Tierramérica. He grows sorghum on about 30 hectares in the Yecapixtla municipality in the southwestern state of Morelos.

Espino is one example of the thousands of small and medium farmers who are unable to modernise their irrigation systems.

The most widely-used system is based on gravity, with electrical pumping equipment. But it “generates inefficiency in the use of water and electricity,” Nemecio Castillo, an advisor with the National Institute of Forestry and Agricultural Research, told Tierramérica.

Seventy-seven percent of Mexico’s piped water goes to agricultural use. There are some 118,000 wells for farming, but the authorities have rehabilitated just 6,000 of them.

Annually, operation of an inefficient well consumes about 200,000 cubic metres of water and generates 350 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases.

A well operated using modern technologies requires half the water and reduces greenhouse emissions to 98 tonnes of CO2, according to calculations by the non-governmental organisations El Barzón and Oxfam Mexico, which are promoting a plan to update the country’s farm irrigation systems.

According to these organisations, inefficient water use in agriculture means that more than 80 percent of Mexico’s 180 largest aquifers are overexploited and it is already difficult to sustain the total irrigated area.

The total farmed area in Mexico is more than 20 million hectares, with irrigation for 5.3 to 5.5 million hectares, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The most abundant crops are maize, beans and sorghum, which require a great deal of water to grow.

Maize — used to make the tortilla, a staple in the Mexican diet — requires 1,700 cubic metres of water per tonne produced, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. One tonne of sorghum needs 1,200 cubic metres of water per tonne.

Of the 630,000 registered farms in Mexico, just 16 percent have irrigation and 12 percent utilise unconventional techniques, report El Barzón and Oxfam.

There are 85 irrigation districts that cover 3.5 million hectares in hands of 583,000 users, particularly in central and northern Mexico, states the National Water Commission.

Those districts demand 30 billion cubic metres of water per year, 90 percent of which comes from reservoirs and 10 percent from underground sources.

From 2000 to 2009, agricultural electrical consumption jumped 17 percent. Government subsidies for energy purchases for farming — about 50 cents on the dollar per kilowatt — have cost 640 million dollars in public funds this year.

A traditional gravity-based system “irrigates one hectare in 24 hours, while a drip system does it in three or four hours,” irrigation engineer José de Santos told Tierramérica.

According to Oxfam and El Barzón, the combination of an efficient well and modernised irrigation would be the equivalent of reducing CO2 emissions by 36 percent, energy consumption 40 percent and water use 50 percent.

Mexico emits 715.3 million tonnes of CO2 per year, six percent originating from agriculture.

Drip irrigation, which directs the water to the plant roots through soaker hoses, and pressurised irrigation, which uses closed pipes and sprinklers to create a directed precipitation, are the main alternatives to irrigation channels.

But their costs are quite prohibitive for small and medium farmers: 2,250 to 2,500 dollars to set up a system, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

An additional obstacle is the government’s slow action on the problem. The Ministry of Agriculture launched the Strategic Project for Irrigation Modernisation, with a budget of 52 million dollars for this year and the goal to update 22,000 hectares, benefitting 1,500 farmers. But the farmers have to put up another four million dollars to obtain the equipment.

“The cost is very high. The problem is that many farmers rent their land, and the owners aren’t interested in adding the technology,” said irrigation expert De Santos.

Since 2006, the National Water Commission has modernised irrigation on 599,000 hectares, with financing of 240 million dollars. The goal for 2012 is to reach 1.2 million hectares with irrigation.

In addition, “we have to move towards crops that require less water,” like garbanzo beans, vegetables, fruits and oil crops. “The farmers need to be aware that water is a finite resource,” said farming advisor Castillo.

In any case, there is no alternative to modernisation: one hectare yields 27.3 tonnes if it is irrigated, compared to just 7.8 tonnes without irrigation. And climate change will only intensify the droughts that are already taking a toll on Mexican farming, warns the National Institute of Ecology.

* This IPS story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network http://www.cdkn.org (END)